I've never used Mac Office, or iWorks. I need to occasionally view/modify Word and Excel documents at home (mostly for work); can iWork do that? I won't typically need to modify them at home, just view them. Also, does the Entourage work with Outlook? My work's email and calendars are all on our outlook exchange server, would I be stuck using outlook lite with Entourage, or would that allow me to access the whole thing? Because outlook lite sucks. I'm just trying to decide between the two office suites...bleh.

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

You can view Word and Excel files with plain old QuickLook; Text Edit will open and even do basic editing on Word files.

As for Office versus iWork; if you go with iWork be prepared to spend a lot of time clicking "Export" (there's no native saving as Word files), but Keynote is a much better presentation tool than Powerpoint and the more I use Pages the more I like it.

Another free Office application suite to try is neo office, based upon open office version 3 but with a few extras included like better vba support more clipart and arguably better docx, pptx and xlsx support.

NeoOffice's big feature is speed. It's faster than OpenOffice.org because it's a more native OpenOffice port. You really can't go wrong with free, for the most part.

iWork is a great suite if you're never going to deal with Office files proper, but in my use, its Office 2007/2008 support is really bad. I use it for personal stuff that I never give to other people, but I still have Office 2008 Home/Teacher edition that I use for compatibility with friends/family/church (my wife in particular needs it because she does PowerPoint shows for church that are presented on a Windows machine running Office 2003).

There's no harm in trying out OpenOffice or NeoOffice for a while. If you decide to stick with it, great. If not, Office 2008 is very nice with a pretty good interface. It's got the Office 2007 ribbon and a formatting pallete for quick access to most formatting options...

(The image is 906 pixels wide, so if you're on a 1024x768 screen or less, you might not see the whole thing)

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.

Most of my family actually uses open office (it's on this PC too).The thing is if I buy iWorks when I buy the Mini, it's cheaper--like 50 bucks versus 80 bucks--so if I'm gonna wind up with it I'd like to save the 30 bucks and do it then. But the lack of a native save command? Sheesh.

EDIT: I May have a way around this, now that I look through my software bin. I have an XP disc that I *think* I still have the activation code for, and I have an old Office 2003 student version with the multi install license. I"m only using 1 of them now so I may just be able to use bootcamp and have a full office on my windows partition to deal with work and crap. Then I can just toss OO on the OsX partition and use it for non work.

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

There's a "native" save command - Cmd+S, just like everything else. But the format is a gzipped bundle*, not Office.

*Apple has alot of different "document" types that are in reality folders with smaller files called Bundles. It's kind of neat because instead of embedding an image or an audio file and possibly changing it, it's just saved in the folder. It's kind of like docx or xlsx files, which if you change the extension to ZIP can be decompressed. Open doc format people "borrowed" the idea from Apple, who in turn had "borrowed" it from NeXT (well, purchased in December 1996), and I'm sure NeXT wasn't the first company to think of it - attempts to "correct" me will be mocked thoroughly. Or not at all, the choice is mine, really. It's not exactly compatible with the internet, though. With iWork 09, they made it so you could actually email iWork files by compressing the folders into single files.

In OS X, bundling started way back in Rhapsody preview builds, bundling frameworks (which are shared libraries, like dlls in Windows) and applications. Most apps are just folders with .app extensions and a special Finder bit toggled that indicates that Finder should look for an executable within the bundle and open the program instead of the folder.

SNM - "speed" is a relative term. Both are slower than, say, Word v.X or 2004 on the same hardware. On Intel Macs, OpenOffice and NeoOffice are plenty fast. In this case, NeoOffice *is* faster than OpenOffice, but using either on PPC hardware is a shameful experience that should never have existed. Anybody miss the PPC days? I certainly don't, not anymore.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.

So I am trying out iWork '09 on the 30-day trial basis, and I am trying to force myself to stick with Numbers instead of falling back on OpenOffice or Excel. But uh...

Numbers is an abomination that should be nuked from orbit. Just try to make a scatter-plot. I dare you, I double-dog dare you.

Also, no button for merge-and-center cell. Why? It's not like they ran out of room! There's PUH LENTY of room for buttons on that interface. The interface is just so... barren. It feels like the program can't do anything (which isn't far from the truth).

Oh, and the number of clicks it takes to draw a border around a cell? It takes me eight clicks. Four if you are a click-and-hold kinda guy. Oh, and that's for every border you wanna draw. It doesn't remember the last-used settings as a button.

Just truly god... aweful. This thing shouldn't even be considered 1.0 status let alone part of a retail product!!!

Pages is merely "okay." Better than Bean but still not quite as good as Word 07. Say what you will about M$ (I stab at thee!!), but they know how to make a relatively intuitive and user-friendly Office app.

Pages is a great tool for creating beautiful fliers, handouts, and other do-it-at-home things that you'd usually get at a print shop. However, as a word processing tool, I think Word is much more no-frills and down to business than pages, which is designed to work with images and formatting, and not really general purpose word processing.

Numbers is next to useless. It doesn't even hold a candle to excel. I used spreadsheets and graphs a lot this past year in both applications for my physics class and only excel had the power and ease of use that felt right.

Keynote, like pages, is an awesome tool for creating beautiful presentations with minimal effort. I'd say its about equal to Powerpoint 08, although Powerpoint does take up more RAM so if that is a consideration of yours definitely go with Keynote.

FF on DDR3 with a Q9550

Flying Fox wrote:Can we have some of what he was smoking? X48? 2x16 SLI? Want some more e-penis with that? How about just get the Nvidia triple SLI board with a water block on the 3xGPUs+chipset+CPU?

paulWTAMU wrote:I've never used Mac Office, or iWorks. I need to occasionally view/modify Word and Excel documents at home (mostly for work); can iWork do that? I won't typically need to modify them at home, just view them. Also, does the Entourage work with Outlook? My work's email and calendars are all on our outlook exchange server, would I be stuck using outlook lite with Entourage, or would that allow me to access the whole thing? Because outlook lite sucks. I'm just trying to decide between the two office suites...bleh.

Entourage does work with Exchange. Do you know which version of Exchange they are running?

derFunkenstein wrote:Stick with it as long as you can, because once you get a taste of just the UI of Leopard on a multi-core Intel system using some sort of discrete graphics you'll kick yourself for not moving sooner.

I have Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and a Core Duo mini at home. At work I have a Core 2 Duo 24" iMac. All of them are running SL. The Dual 2.7 G5 running Leopard still stands up. The problem I am facing is that I'm not sure what to replace it with. I wish Apple would hurry up and transition to i5/i7. The mythical xMac with an i5/i7 would be perfect.

End User wrote:The problem I am facing is that I'm not sure what to replace it with. I wish Apple would hurry up and transition to i5/i7. The mythical xMac with an i5/i7 would be perfect.

Aren't the Mac Pros using the Bloomfield-based Xeons?

Up to this point Apple has artificially protected the Mac Pro lineup by ignoring Intel's entire desktop Core 2 Duo/Quad lineup. I have an issue with that. I refuse to spend $3,500 CDN on a single socket Mac Pro that a barely beats a consumer quad in performance. I'd rather upgrade my PC to an Core i7-860 config for $1,000 CDN for the CPU intensive stuff.